Gartner has released a new report that analyzes the market for IT operations and management software. While IBM and CA still lead the pack of vendors, they are losing market share to Microsoft, VMware and several small firms.

In its press release, Gartner reported, "Worldwide IT operations management (ITOM) software revenue totaled $18 billion in 2012, up 4.8 percent from $17 billion in 2011, according to final results from Gartner, Inc. However, Gartner said that the 'Big Four' ITOM vendors — IBM, CA Technologies, BMC Software and HP — surrendered market share in 2012, while a new generation of ITOM vendors grew significantly faster than the market."

Nathan Eddy with eWeek wrote, "Continued investments in virtualization management tools and promising cloud computing technologies helped push the growth of the market, according to the report. The top five ITOM vendors, ranked by revenue, grew 0.6 percent in 2012, compared with 7 percent growth in 2011, and accounted for 55 percent share, or $9.9 billion, of the overall ITOM software market in terms of revenue."

ZDNet's Toby Wolpe added, "A group of the fastest-growing companies, made up of ServiceNow, SolarWinds, Splunk and VMware, can muster growth rates ranging from 84.4 percent for ServiceNow to 45.5 percent for SolarWinds."